I am lost in my own factory. From every direction, every angle, conveyor belts and smelters and assemblers obscure my senses and envelop my being. Twenty hours ago I placed my first manufacturer somewhere around here. Back then it represented the state of the art, hatching me a pristine batch of 1.25 computers every minute - now I’ve forgotten where I put the damn thing, after delving into my factory’s guts to hook that piddly yet still useful batch of old relics up to my main production line. I’m building supercomputers now, and the many manufacturers that make those are hungry.
Something is always hungry in Satisfactory, and that hunger pulls you from task to task in a near-seamless and frankly beautiful daze of ever-escalating industry. It is mesmerising and it is fearsome, and after five years of early access it’s finally complete.
]]>Grand duchess of first-person factory sims Satisfactory has finally hit 1.0 on PC after five years in early access, introducing a "full narrative overhaul" together with some new alien technology which you can witness and boggle at via the 1.0 launch trailer, below. They've also announced a console version, but we don't care for such things. The only Satisfactory console I care about is the one that lets you deactivate the fog so you can obtain an unmurky view of your glittering conveyor belt empire.
]]>The space industrialism of Satisfactory is distinct from other efficiency sims about making endless conveyor belts in two important ways. One: it's a mash-up with the first-person survival genre that sees you stranded on an alien planet, a la Subnautica. Two: there is a dedicated coffee cup item from which you can leisurely sip. It's been in early access since 2019 and, hey, it's rather good. We knew developers Coffee Stain were planning a 1.0 release this year. But more concrete details from management have finally trickled down to the little guy. Version 1.0 will hit stores on September 10th, they say. The complete version will include flushable toilets, a "much sought after addition to the game", we're told.
]]>Can you believe it’s been almost half a decade since Satisfactory unleashed its gloriously pleasing factory-building hijinks into early access? And that, five years on, it’s still yet to hit 1.0? Well, you best believe it, as devs Coffee Stain Studios have confirmed that Satisfactory will finally reach the end of the early access conveyer belt sometime in 2024.
]]>Satisfactory now has game modes and blueprints as of Update 7, which is now available in the main Early Access release of the survival builder. If you're a hardcore factory builder, these are a big deal: blueprints make it easy to replicate structure layouts quickly, and game modes let you make Satisfactory's alien fauna harmless.
]]>Satisfactory's update 6 is now available in the scifi craft 'em up's early access release. It makes several sweeping changes to the game, including revamping existing weapons, adding new locations to enhance exploration, and, uh, a boombox, so you can blast music while you build. There's a new update trailer below.
]]>Satisfactory has been putting out regular major updates since the factory sim launched in early access back in 2020, but it's developers are now changing focus a little. A new video which describes the contents of the next release - Update 6, focused on exploration - also explains why the development team are going to start taking longer between releases. The short answer? Because they're working on releasing version 1.0.
]]>As factory-building sim Satisfactory continues to assemble itself through early access, the next major update runs a real risk of becoming a train wreck. Now in public testing, Update 5 introduces new features to manage train timetables and routes, and you'll want to pay attention to those because trains can now crash.
]]>One of my favourite memories from the past 15 years of doing this daft job was at EVE Online's fan fest. A developer on stage in a packed auditorium announced a more efficient way to move items between cargo holds, and the crowd around me erupted with "We just won the World Cup"-level cheering.
This is what Satisfactory's update 4 trailer reminds me of. Today's update adds hoverpacks, drones and particle accelerators to the factory building game, but it feels like it's a set of street lights turning on at the end that would get the biggest cheer.
]]>Introversion Software, the makers of Prison Architect, have been making a video series about all the prototypes they've created and scrapped over the past several years. This month's prototype is 'Minecraft Factory' or 'Voxel Factory', an attempt in 2017 to make a Factorio-like game out of Minecraft-style blocks.
You can watch a video where they demonstrate the prototype and why they binned the idea - and then you can buy and play it, if you like, with all the money going to charity.
]]>Factory building game Satisfactory's major new update is available to play now. It adds a ton of major new features, including hoverpacks, drones, lighting, and a particle accelerator, alongside dozens more small tweaks and quality-of-life updates.
]]>Satisfactory is a factory-building game. Which means that, by its nature, it has been fighting an uphill battle. Why? Because Factorio exists.
And yet you have to congratulate Coffee Stain on what they've accomplished against these odds. They've put together a surprisingly robust and extremely fun factory-builder in a 3D environment, which in itself is enough to prove wrong my predictions when I first heard about the game. But more than that: they've given us a factory-builder where the overwhelming feeling is one of possibility and hope, rather than - in Factorio's case - bleak and uninviting.
]]>From an early age, humans know that if they want to be taken seriously, they must learn how to deliver a convincing car noise. Vrrrrummm, they might say. Or perhaps: brrrrrr-bp-brrr. These are the nascent efforts of the budding speed freak, and they must be respected. But once again the realm of videogames encroaches upon the germinal life of the human with pitiless velocity. Car games put a stop to make-believe noise, and introduce fully realised cars on a screen, ready for the racing, shiny bonnets and vrrrrummm noises included. Thus, the imagination dies, and these, the 10 best cars in PC games, are born. Beep beep.
]]>Satisfactory’s Update 3 is one of gaming’s great bait and switches. For months, developer Coffee Stain had been denying that its first-person factory-building game would ever have pipes. Why would they? You could already transport liquids on conveyors, so what was the point? And then in February, the studio presented a magnificently overblown trailer which confirmed the opposite of what they’d been claiming for all this time. Pipes were coming. The chat went wild.
]]>There it is, the trans-planetary pipeline. One long tube of metal scarring a rural alien planet. It brings coal and water to my power stations, and electricity to my factories. It has taken a day of planning, construction and pumping. Now, the pipeline stands before me, a snaking behemoth of energy consumption. Suddenly, a thought comes. Why didn't I just build coal stations next to the vein? I could have stretched a cheap wire across the planet, instead of a kilometre-long death pipe.
This is Satisfactory, a cracking first-person factory-builder that's been in early access on Epic for a while. It's coming to Steam today, so RPS management dispatched me to inspect the game's machinery and ruin the extraterrestrial idyll with smog and incompetence. They sent the right person.
]]>Giant automated industry builder Satisfactory has been on the assembly line for a while already, first debuting on the Epic Games Store last year. The Factorio-but-3D builder has churned out new additions to its early access version since then, including giant trains and guns and vertical conveyors. The mammoth machines are reaching another milestone when Satisfactory launches on Steam—still in early access—on Monday, June 8th.
]]>Brill as environment-despoiling industrialist sim Satisfactory is, it felt like it was missing something. With today's addition of big automated freight trains to the early access sandbox, I realise what Coffee Stain hadn't yet cribbed from Factorio. Today's update also adds some lush new biomes to explore, and a way to completely screw it all up. Nuclear power plants produce tons of power (great for trains), but churn out deadly nuclear waste (less great), which needs disposing of (by train?). Below, a dev video featuring all the above and some oddly sexy pizza.
]]>Today, Coffee Stain rolled out their first major early access update for Satisfactory, their 3D Factorio-like space-industrial sandbox. While shockingly good even in its first release, it still felt like the game had some gaps to fill. Today's update adds new vertical conveyor belts, an exploration vehicle with springy suspension, demolition charges and firearms which go a long way to filling out those blanks. Below, a straight-to-the-point developer update video, made significantly more amusing by hair-dye interfering with their chroma key effects, or the full patch notes here.
]]>The Factorio-esque delights of building machines to build machines until a pretty alien planet is converted into a vast machine building one really big machine today enters a first-person perspective with the early access of launch of Satisfactory. Made by Coffee Stain Studios, the mob behind Goat Simulator and--more relevantly--Sanctum, it is unashamedly Factorio in 3D but that intimate perspective does make a difference when you're racing around in buggies or building up into the heavens.
]]>Satisfactory, the Factorio-style automated building game from Coffee Stain, is going to be huge. It's going to be huge because there are going to be so many videos of huge things built within it, and we're all going to look at those and think "now I want to make something huge."
The overriding question here was always whether or not Satisfactory could successfully transpose the spaghetti junction of autonomous conveyor belts and heavy machinery traditionally beheld from a top-down, third-person perspective into shiny first-person 3D. How can one possibly manage these thumping, churning cat's cradles when even a small fraction of one fills the screen entirely?
]]>Coffee Stain Studios are probably tired of everyone saying that their Goat Simulator and Sanctum follow-up Satisfactory looks like a first-person Factorio, but I'd say that's a comparison to embrace. A very good thing given a new perspective, plus dune buggies and jetpacks? Yeah, g'wan.
It's been a bit quiet on the Satisfactory front for a while now, other than news that the factory-builder would be an Epic Games Store exclusive, but hot off the production line is this shiny new newsmobile - an early access version of Satisfactory is due later this month.
There's also a extremely fancy new trailer, which features erotic stroking of gleaming conveyor belts. They know their audience.
]]>"We're doing an 8chan AMA and we have no idea why," announced THQ Nordic on their Twitter account earlier this evening. If you're not aware, 8chan is an imageboard website which has been de-listed from Google search results for hosting "suspected child abuse content," and which is associated with Swatting and Gamergate.
THQ Nordic's marketing director has since apologised and claimed ignorance, but both are hard to believe.
]]>Wow 2019 is a thing, huh? How are we all doing? Relieved? Bowling a hangover and a nagging sense of trepidation? Maybe you work in retail and, surprise! You were supposed to be at work half an hour ago. Time loses all meaning post-New Year break, doesn't it? You're just sort of adrift in a sea of empty Quality Street wrappers. That's okay. We're all there too.
Pretty soon the grim news cycle is going to grind to life again. Only three months until -- no! Don't think about it. We still have a moment here, on the crinkly, brightly coloured waves. Listen to their quiet rustling and think, not about reality, but about games! Yes, lovely, shiny games. We can bury our face right in them. And from that point of view the next 12 months are looking pretty good. Here's our selection of the games we're most looking forward to next year.
]]>In case you hadn't gleaned this detail from today's many posts mentioning games launching on Epic's Store: Epic's new digital games store has now opened for business. While their "hand-curated set of games" only includes four you can actually buy right now, one of them is the surprise new game from the makers of Bastion and that's not a bad coup. Epic Games have managed to wangle some other upcoming hot exclusives too, including PlayStation darling Journey and Coffee Stain's first-person factory-builder Satisfactory (which has scrapped its plans for a Steam release). To tempt players into installing another store client, Epic plan to give away a game every fortnight, starting with the splendid Subnautica.
]]>THQ Nordic have gobbled up yet more studios, today announcing they've bought Bugbear Entertainment and Coffee Stain Studios. Bugbear are the smash-happy Finnish studio behind racing games including Wreckfest and the first three FlatOuts, while Coffee Stain made FPS tower defence series Sanctum and wack 'em up Goat Simulator as well as publishing games including Deep Rock Galatic. It sounds like they broadly plan to have the studios continue to do their things, with Bugbear making roughhousing racers and Coffee Stain both making and publishing games.
]]>Now that the festival of bellowing that is E3 2018 has come to an end, we begin the arduous process of making sense of it all. This means sifting through mountains of press releases and trailers to find all the curious games that lurked outside the spotlight glare of the larger publishers. And we find such treats as Maneater (Jaws RPG where you play as Jaws), Rapture Rejects (battle royale where you fight for the last spot in heaven) and Neo Cab (Uber-sim meets Blade Runner). So many delightful things, in fact, that new video person Noa couldn't resist gathering them together.
]]>We'll build machines to build machines to build machines to build a mysterious massive machine in Satisfactory, the next game from Sanctum and Goat Simulator developers Coffee Stain Studios. If that sounds a lot like Wube Software's fantastic Factorio, you'll probably think it looks a lot like it too after watching the new trailer. "It's x but y" is always a crude way to describe a game but... Satisfactory sure does resemble Factorio but first-person. Which, really, I am up for.
]]>We're in the run-up to GDC and E3 again, so that means it's teaser trailer season. Today's ad-for-an-ad comes from Goat Simulator and Sanctum studio Coffee Stain, and I think they might have the camera pointed the wrong way, although I kinda hope they don't, because I have very little interest in anything but this adorable alien lizard/lobster/puppy thing now.
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